Member-only story
Lapsed Catholic
A poem about the trinity of loss
I was told you watched everything.
Judged my every choice, myriads of sins.
Yet you couldn’t save my friend when he
put the barrel of a shotgun to his head,
just like his hero. Or my uncles when they
died fleeing the battered past that laid
waste to their trek to Damascus.
Did you watch as my father fell
into madness as he lost his money to Enron?
Each nail pinned his hands on a bottle.
I never dared touch his wounds.
You watched everything, doing nothing,
struggling to keep our guilt fed
without drowning in the flood.
The ark couldn’t fit all of us,
so we became seaweed, wrapped
around shore rocks.
Did you judge me those years
I could barely breathe, believing only in
dust motes coiled around my bookshelves,
and that damn empty wedding ring,
that prison keyhole.
Yet still, the only thing that kept me alive,
waiting to make me pay for the sin
of fleeing the confessional booth where
the true monster sat — waiting to eat
our innocence — was the fear
that I was wrong and what waited
for me beyond this world: a giant
hungry snake wound around
the tree of life, just inside the closed
and abandoned Pearly Gates?
